iDemand feedback: investigation of feedback behaviour with efficient solutions for improving student satisfaction

There are many pressures on academics to ‘satisfy’ students’ needs for feedback, not least the inclusion of questions about feedback in the National Student Survey. In this paper we firstly investigate how a student cohort of approx 280 in a UK Business School perceives and defines feedback by using an questionnaires and group interviews. The initial research showed that firstly there were significant differences in views regarding both the preferred method and the relative value of different types of feedback. Secondly, feedback provided before the final summative assessment was perceived as more preferable than feedback after the final submission. Our findings suggest that student cohorts are not homogenous in their feedback preferences and that it is not resource efficient or effective for academic staff to provide detailed individual feedback to all students. Students should be offered a hierarchy of feedback on demand and some of the effort could then be reallocated from summative feedback to formative assessment and feedback.